This vote is about fleet design and doctrine. Not about tactical decisions.
We can and may still choose to employ deep strikes as the opportunity turns up.
But that is quite different from designing our entire navy to have a glass jaw.
And frankly, the fun argument makes no sense.
The Rachni have been hitting us since Turn 3. We've not exactly been sitting back.
No dreads. No cruisers.
Just BCs and light cruisers, against an enemy demonstrably capable of spamming dreadnoughts.
In a quest where we own only one major star system.
As a reminder, BCs were made to kill cruisers, so that cruisers could kill dreads.
They are not designed as dreadnought killers.
So if you adopt a doctrine that relies on expensive BCs and deemphasizes cruisers, do it in the full awareness that you are courting Trouble.
No it isn't.
When your base is insecure, you tend to leave more forces behind to make sure you don't lose your economy.
It's simple prudence.
The GM is scrupulously fair, but I don't want to rely on GM generosity to survive bad rolls.
I remember what happened during our last battle, when we started rolling poorly after a fantastic start. If we weren't set up to survive, that would have been painful as fuck.
It's almost like Guerre De Course, was designed around a much weaker navy gaining the capacity to savage stronger navies. The Rachni's strength here is a mark in favor of raiding not against.
Let's examine the facts: Rachni ships are poor in terms of quality, rachni doctrine is not exceptionally advanced, Rachni have a massive material advantage, rachni have relatively long logistics tails to actually get to us considering how quickly they're remnants in this cluster are running on fumes.
This is pretty much absolutely the best possible context to explore and test a raiding strategy. A foe we can generally guarantee local superiority over, who's methods require a large logistical footprint and who is liable to be at the long end of a supply chain to campaign against us, and has minimal context or doctrine against a raiding campaign.
It's beyond fucking idiotic to say 'they can spam dreads at us, of course we can't afford to to schrimp on our dreads'
Trying to seize local capital ship superiority is idiotic, all those cheap but plentiful ships require more fuel, more supplies, more parts, more berths, more everything vulnerable to raiders- you are literally talking about all the vulnerabilities to the doctrine I favor and declaring it some mark against.
I'm going to spell this out before you scream more and more about Dreads countering BCs- Raiding won't pit BCs against Dreads. It'll attack their basing, their fuel depots, their pocket squadrons and laugh as it merrily drops shots from across a system to kill orbitals and infrastructure before FTLing away before retaliation can arrive.
The point of raiding, especially here is that our raiders can slaughter anything but a Dread, but dreads are always going to be relatively rare so raiders can simply target wherever dreads aren't and lead them on chases. They have to respond to raiding or soon enough they can't actually deploy those massive, resource intensive war machines, they need to deploy to counter raiders. It's a catch 22 that leverages multiple smaller fleets in redibly well, providing so many relatively minor axises of attack that you can deploy enough dreads to effectively cover them all.
And a Rachni dread chasing one of our BCs is a bad bet if it's not careful.
There is no better time for raiding than against someone with superior tonnage, long logistics, inferior quality and doctrine, and other commitments- considering raiders are all about disproportionate commitments.
